Lemon Pepper Wings with Lemon Pepper Sauce

Chicken wings baked with a cornflour coating and then tossed in a sauce of lemon zest, lemon juice, honey, butter and black pepper. No country is claimed. Lemon pepper wings are American, and strongly associated with Atlanta, where lemon pepper wings from a particular style of takeaway are close to a civic institution. The cornflour is the one technique here worth understanding, and it is genuinely effective. Tossing dry wings in cornflour before baking draws moisture from the skin and forms a thin coating that dries and crisps in the oven, giving something much closer to a fried texture without a fryer. It works because cornflour contains no gluten and does not go bready, the same reason it appears in so many Asian frying batters. Two things have to happen for it to work. The wings must be patted properly dry first, because cornflour on wet skin turns to paste. And the sauce goes on after baking, not before, sugar in the honey burns over a thirty-minute bake, and a wet coating would undo the crisping entirely. The source's ingredient list is scrambled, with its section headings absorbed into it, and one entry reads "½ stick honey", which is not a unit honey comes in. Rebuilt below.